


Names and Faces

by nagi_schwarz



Series: Comment Fic 2016 [113]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-13
Updated: 2016-11-13
Packaged: 2018-08-30 20:41:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8548426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: Written for the comment_fic prompt: "Stargate Atlantis, John Sheppard + David Sheppard, Dave knew, intellectually, that his brother had killed people, but watching him shoot someone to save Dave's life made it all too real."John Sheppard remembers every single person he's killed, whether he knew their names or saw their faces.





	

The thing about John was, well, he didn’t look like a soldier. It was mostly his hair, which had always been unruly. He’d worn it longer when he was younger, and it had looked marginally neater. When he’d first joined the Air Force ROTC and gotten a regulation haircut, he’d looked so bizarre with buzzed hair - and it had made his ears even more obvious. And now it was - totally unruly. Dave was pretty sure John’s hair was non-regulation.   
  
Almost twenty years in the service and John still slouched everywhere, too. Perched on the arms of chairs and corners of tables instead of sitting neatly, the way he and Dave had been taught by their nannies when they were children. He’d started that as open rebellion against their father, but they hadn’t spoken for about a decade, and now it seemed that was part of John. Perching in strange places.  
  
John hadn’t worn his uniform to Dad’s funeral or really any other occasion when Dave thought he might have been allowed to wear it. He hadn’t worn his cammo uniform for the journey home either. John was tall and lean, certainly didn’t look like the kind of bruiser Dave imagined most soldiers to be. Granted, the Air Force was considered the lesser of the armed forces. Dave had heard multiple Chair Force jokes. John was certainly no Marine. But shouldn’t he have looked more like a soldier?  
  
John had never been aggressive, tended toward sarcasm and smirks instead of throwing punches. Where Dave had been in a few fistfights, John tended to stay back, in the shadows, and wait for a fight to burn itself out. In school, John had actually been - bookish. Shy. Preferred numbers to people. And he was good at numbers. Dave was good at words, with people.   
  
Maybe John refusing to join the family business shouldn’t have been a surprise.  
  
John coming to visit when he was on annual leave (where was he posted, that he only got annual leave?) was a pleasant surprise. He’d spent time with the girls, playing guitar for them and riding horses with them. He’d gone out to dinner with Dave and Kathy, asked after the company and Kathy’s charities. Tonight, going on a beer run with Dave before they sat down and watched some MMA fights, was like old times, when they were both in college and watched boxing matches together.  
  
“You still drinking Bud?” Dave asked.  
  
“Bud’s hard to come by, and my regular drinking buddy likes Molson, so.” John shrugged.  
  
“Molson? What is he, Canadian?”  
  
“Yes, and unbearably smug about it.” John and Dave were wandering the aisles of the convenience store closest to the house.  
  
“What’s a Canadian -?”  
  
“Civilian contractor.”  
  
“Like Ronon?”  
  
“No. Rodney’s a physicist. And an engineer.”  
  
“How can he be both?”  
  
“He has two PhD’s. Which he’s also unbearably smug about.” John selected a bag of lime tortilla chips and placed them in the little green basket Dave was holding. He also chose some popcorn, some salsa, a bag of regular potato chips, and French onion dip.  
  
“Are you planning on eating any real food tonight?” Dave asked. “We’re not twenty anymore.”  
  
“I wasn’t kidding when I said my posting was remote,” John said. “I’m lucky to see chips once every six months. I’m enjoying while I can.”  
  
Dave knew better than to press about how classified John’s posting was. If Nancy hadn’t been able to penetrate the Great Wall of Classified, Dave didn’t have a chance in hell.  
  
“That sounds inhuman,” he said.  
  
John laughed. “You have no idea.”  
  
“What about ice cream?” Dave asked. “Do you get ice cream where you are?”  
  
“Not nearly enough.” John paused in front of the freezer and looked almost dreamy at the ice cream selection.  
  
“Why are you still in the Air Force again?”  
  
“Waiting to hit my twenty and then retire peacefully.”  
  
“Right.” Dave glanced at him. “Where would you retire?”  
  
“I’m torn between Hawaii and somewhere I’ll never see the ocean again.” John pulled open one of the freezer doors and selected a pint of pistachio gelato. He grabbed a pint of rocky road. “Still your poison?”  
  
“Still is.” Dave accepted both cartons and put them in the basket.  
  
They grabbed a few more snacks - the fights were slated to last for about four hours - and headed for the counter.   
  
The line was surprisingly long, so Dave set the heavy basket on the ground, nudged it forward with his foot.

“Who are you looking forward to seeing tonight?” He glanced at John.  
  
John shrugged. “You think we get fights somewhere we don’t even get ice cream? I’m pretty out of the loop about who’s hot and who’s not. I just want to see some good athletes.”  
  
“Do you get football?”  
  
“A couple of months out of date, yes.”  
  
Dave frowned. “You send emails, though. Once a week.”  
  
“Because we can only connect once a week. Everything else is run on intranet.”   
  
“How do you stay sane?”  
  
“Rodney and I play a lot of chess. And I’m reading _War and Peace_.”  
  
Dave nudged the basket forward. “You never liked the Russians.”  
  
“Which is why it’s a formidable challenge.”  
  
“You blew through _Les Mis_ like nobody’s business. In the original French, no less.”  
  
John tucked his hands into his pockets, scanned his surroundings idly. “I haven’t had occasion to point out to Rodney that I speak French better than he does.”  
  
“How are you and Rodney even friends?”  
  
“Save each other’s lives enough and, well, it kind of happens.”  
  
“I thought Rodney was a civilian.”  
  
“He is.”  
  
“But he goes into combat?”  
  
“Well -”  
  
There was a commotion at the front of the line. The red-headed man in the hoodie was yelling at the clerk, and everyone in front of John and Dave was screaming and ducking.  
  
Dave glimpsed the gun in the red-headed man’s hand for only a second before John pushed him to the floor.  
  
“I said open the cash register and give me the money!” the red-headed man snarled.  
  
Dave dared to lift his head.  
  
The clerk, a teenage girl with big brown eyes, was pale beneath her dark skin. Blood trickled from her nose and the corner of her mouth, and she was trembling as she fumbled at the register. It wasn’t opening.  
  
“ _Open it!_ ” There was an ominous click as the red-headed man aimed his gun at the clerk’s head.  
  
Everyone else was lying on the ground, face down, sobbing. Everyone but John, who was crouched and looked ready to spring.  
  
The clerk sobbed, her hands shaking.  
  
The red-headed man pistol-whipped her.  
  
She dropped behind the counter with a cry.  
  
The red-headed man started to hoist himself up onto the counter, and John was on him.   
  
What happened next was a blur, but it ended with the red-headed man on the floor and John training the gun on him.  
  
“Stay down.” John’s expression was blank, unreadable. His hands on the gun were completely steady, and he looked calm. “Dave, go check on the clerk. Someone, call 911.”  
  
“John -”  
  
“Dave. She went down hard.” John sounded calm, too.  
  
Dave, eyes on the red-headed man, rose up slowly, went around the counter. The clerk was lying on the floor, unmoving. Dave knelt, checked her pulse.  
  
“She’s still alive.”  
  
“Good,” John said.  
  
In the background, someone was talking on the phone, calling 911.  
  
Dave rose up. “What do I do? Should I move her?”  
  
“You remember first aid training?” John asked. “Recovery position?”  
  
The red-headed man’s chest was heaving. “Some kind of hero, are you?”  
  
“Don’t do anything stupid,” John said.  
  
The red-headed man spat at him. “The stupid one is you.”  
  
“I’m the one with the gun.”  
  
The red-headed man grinned, gaze manic, and Dave felt something in his gut twist. “Yeah, but I’m not alone.”  
  
The front door of the store burst open, and the red-headed man launched to his feet.  
  
Gunfire was so much louder in real life than on television.  
  
Two shots rang out, echoed by human screams.  
  
Two bodies dropped to the floor. John was on top of the other man, kicking a gun away from his hand. Dave stared as bloodstains blossomed across the front of the red-headed man’s hoodie, the other man’s t-shirt.  
  
John wasn’t even breathing hard. “Stay here,” he said, though to whom Dave had no clue. John edged out the front door, scanned the parking lot. “Clear.” Then he backed into the store, didn’t lower the gun till the door was closed. “Anyone else hurt?”  
  
“No.” Dave swallowed hard. “I don’t think so.”  
  
John emptied the gun, tucked the magazine into his pocket, and set the gun aside. Then he came around the counter and knelt beside the clerk. He checked her pulse and her breathing, arranged her in recovery position. He dispatched Dave to the bathroom to grab some paper towels to wipe the blood off her face, and then he went and checked on everyone else.

Dave’s hands were shaking as he tugged paper towels out of the dispenser, but John was calm. He was patting people on the shoulder, helping them to their feet.  
  
This was it. This was John, the soldier. Dave knew that as a soldier John had most likely killed people, but -  
  
The two bodies remained on the floor, limbs akimbo, blood pooling beneath them.  
  
Flashing lights hailed the arrival of police and EMS. John surrendered the gun and ammo to the police officer, then gave a statement. Paramedics put the clerk on a stretcher and wheeled her out to the ambulance. More paramedics zipped the two bodies into black body bags, loaded them into stretchers, and wheeled them out of the store. Through it all, Dave stood on the sidelines, huddled against a chill that had stolen over him. The other convenience store patrons - an elderly black woman, a couple of blond teenage boys, a middle-aged Latino man - gave statements to the police as well. They were shaken, but they kept looking at John, and more than once Dave heard the words _brave_ and _hero_.  
  
The police officer who interviewed Dave was a short, stocky woman. “Name?”  
  
“David Sheppard.”  
  
“Contact information?”  
  
Dave rattled off his address and phone number.  
  
“What can you tell me?”  
  
“I heard shouting at the front of the line, and then there was screaming, and then John pushed me to the floor.”  
  
“John?”  
  
“My brother.” Dave nodded over to where John was still being interviewed.  
  
“What next?”  
  
“The robber hit the clerk in the face and then went to climb over the counter, and John just - went after him. Got his gun. I went to check on the clerk, and she was still alive, and then that second guy came charging in, and -” Dave broke off. It was getting hard to breathe.  
  
The police officer peered at him. “Sir, are you all right?”  
  
“I just watched my brother kill two people. He was protecting me, but -” Dave staggered back.  
  
The police officer caught his shoulder, called for help. Two more police officers were there in an instant, helped Dave sit down on the edge of the sidewalk.  
  
“Mr. Sheppard, do you need me to call someone?” the police officer asked.  
  
John was at Dave’s side immediately. “Hey, buddy. Put your head between your knees. You’re hyperventilating.” He still sounded so calm.  
  
Dave obeyed.   
  
“Colonel Sheppard,” said another police officer. “We’re not finished.”  
  
“Can we finish later? I need to get my brother home.”  
  
“Colonel -”  
  
“Check the security footage.” John’s tone was steely. “Dave needs to get home and get to bed.”  
  
“Let them go, Farnsworth,” said the female police officer who’d been interviewing Dave. “Talk to them tomorrow. You have their contact info?”  
  
Farnsworth sighed. “Fine. Go. But don’t go anywhere for the next few days.”  
  
“Wasn’t planning on it.” John helped Dave to his feet, guided him back to the car, buckled him into the passenger seat, and took the wheel.  
  
They drove in silence for three minutes before Dave said, “You killed them.”  
  
“They would have killed all of us.”  
  
“How can you be so calm?”  
  
“Not my first rodeo. Not even my scariest, not by a long shot.”  
  
“But they were people.”  
  
“They were.” John’s expression was bleak. “They were human beings. It was us versus them, and I chose us. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”  
  
“You’d kill them?”  
  
“If it meant keeping you safe.”  
  
Dave wasn’t sure what to say. Finally he said, “Thank you.”  
  
John flinched. “No. Don’t thank me. Never thank me for taking a human life.”  
  
“I’m sorry.”  
  
“I am, too. Sorry you were in that situation. Sorry you had to see that.”  
  
“Sorry you killed them?”  
  
John said nothing. Then he said, “A teenage boy, outside Fallujah.”  
  
Dave blinked, confused. “What?”  
  
“An enemy convoy over Kabul.”  
  
“I don’t understand.”  
  
“A handful of Taliban rebels who’d shot down Captain Lyle Holland’s chopper.”  
  
“John -”  
  
“Colonel Marshall Sumner. A female whose name I never learned.”  
  
“John?”  
  
“I remember every single person I’ve killed, whether I knew their names or saw their faces.”  
  
Dave said nothing.  
  
“I’ll leave as soon as the police are finished with me. There’s paperwork I should do back on base anyway.”  
  
“John, no!”  
  
John glanced at Dave. “You and Dad never understood. I’m not like you.”  
  
“I want to understand. Help me understand.”  
  
“I hope you never do.”


End file.
